Richard was not going to have an easy task… an impossible task, if Gloucester had his way.
Neville reached for another report and unfolded it, his eyes unseeing as they traveled over the closely written lines. Gloucester would hotly oppose the tax as a means of trying to remove de Vere from influence at court, and, moreover, meant to raise the voice of other lords to his cause. Neville was aware that last night Lancaster, Raby and Bolingbroke had spent hours arguing with Gloucester about what would be said and done at Parliament this day. It was not that they didn’t agree with Gloucester’s opposition, but that they felt a direct attack on Richard, in Parliament, was a more than foolhardy move.
But Gloucester had faith in Parliament, and in its power, as he did in the collective power of the lords there gathered. Parliament had opposed a king and won before. Today, perhaps, it would do so again.
The problem was, Neville thought as he smoothed out the report for the tenth time, who among the lords were demons, and who were god-fearing men?
THE DAY passed agonizingly slowly, and it wasn’t until the bells rang for Vespers and Neville was reaching for an intriguing unopened casket under his table that he heard horses clatter into the courtyard. The casket forgotten, Neville rose so quickly and violently from his desk that documents scattered across the floor. Margaret and Rosalind had long gone, Margaret to sit with Mary and Rosalind to be put to bed by Agnes, and the three clerks had also left for their residences. Courtenay was the only one left to keep Neville company.
As Neville ran out the door, Courtenay was directly behind him.
The courtyard was filled with horses—far more men had come back to the Savoy than had left it this morning. Besides the Lancastrian party, Neville recognized Warwick and Arundel, both great nobles who had met secretly with Lancaster in the storage chamber of the Savoy that night some three months ago. There were others, too, that Neville did not recognize—
some patently lords, others attendants to those lords—sweet Jesu!
Suddenly Neville caught sight of his uncle. He pushed his way through men and horses, grabbing at Raby’s arm.
“Uncle? What happened?”
Raby turned about to face him, and Neville gasped at the haggard look on Raby’s face.
“Gloucester made a stand,” he said, wasting no words on pretty narratives. “Many among the lords listened to him. Parliament has adjourned to discuss the poll tax, but the general consensus seems to be that it shall not be allowed. Richard… Richard is furious.”
Neville could imagine. “What will—” he started, then got no further.
Raby had turned and was now shouting through the throng to Gloucester. “My lord! My lord!
This way!”
And Neville suddenly realized what was going on. Richard was so enraged that all now feared for Gloucester’s life. Raby, as just about everyone else, it appeared, was endeavoring to remove Gloucester from London as fast as possible. Thus the crowd. Gloucester would surely be safer in a crowd than anywhere else.
Whatever the plans, Gloucester was apparently having none of them. Both Lancaster and Arundel were by his side, but Gloucester was angrily refusing their requests that he make his way to the waiting barge. He thrust aside Lancaster’s frantic pleas and Arundel’s desperate hand, and started to shove his way through the throng.
Neville could see Lancaster and Arundel move after him, as also Bolingbroke who was several paces distant.
Then, just for an instant, all were lost amid the throng of milling horses and men and—
—and Neville remembered Lancaster and Gloucester trying to make their their way through the dancing carollers to their father that Christmas Day a year past—
—Neville screamed a warning, punching aside two men who blocked his vision, but even as he pushed past he was struck by the shoulder of a plunging horse and he almost fell to the ground. Just as he regained his balance, and was shoving forward again, he heard shouts, frantic shouts, a desperate scuffling of boots, several grunts as men had the breath knocked out of them, and a strange clatter as if of a knife falling to the cobbles …
The crowd parted and Neville stumbled into open space. Directly before him lay two still, bloodied bodies on the cobbles.
Gloucester and Arundel.
Lancaster, who was kneeling beside his brother’s lifeless body, slowly raised his head, staring with unseeing eyes at Neville who was directly before him.
The duke raised his hands, and they were covered in blood.
“Has Richard this much power,” he whispered, “that he can strike into the heart of my family?
Is he this confident?”
CHAPTER XI
The Thursday within the
Octave of the Conversion of St. Paul
In the first year of the reign of Richard II
(26th January 1380)
— II —
FOR A LONG MINUTE no one spoke, no one moved. All stared at the two corpses and Lancaster kneeling above them, looking bewildered at the blood covering his hands.
It was no man who broke the stillness and silence, but Mary.
She had walked unseen from the door leading into the Savoy, pushed unremarked through the throng, and only seemed to enter Neville’s field of vision as she knelt down by Lancaster.
Mary laid a hand on his arm. “Father. We can do naught here. We must move them inside, into a state fit for their nobility.”
It was not her movement, nor even her manner of addressing Lancaster, but the gentleness with which she spoke that seemed to break the spell binding the courtyard.
Lancaster blinked, lowered his hands, and turned to stare at Mary. The bewildered expression had vanished, replaced by a profound rage—although it was not directed at Mary.
“There is nothing you can do here for them,” Mary said, holding her father-in-law’s eyes, “but everything you can do for them elsewhere.”
Margaret had now materialized behind them, and Mary turned her head slightly to speak to her.
“Have two trestle tables set up in the great hall. We can lay them there.”
Margaret nodded, and vanished, and as she did so, Mary helped Lancaster rise to his feet.
Now the courtyard crowd began to murmur and swell. Men shifted and whispered, then some moved to shout accusations and grab at suspects.
But none, thought Neville, had moved so well nor so quickly as Mary. Why is it always the women who so brilliantly oversee the gateways of birth and death?
For a moment Neville’s thoughts drifted away. There was something about the way Mary had knelt at Lancaster’s side, something in her posture …
“Tom?”
Bolingbroke. Neville jerked out of his momentary reverie and turned as Hal reached his side.
The prince was pale and shaking; shocked not so much at the deaths, Neville thought, but at Richard’s audacity in arranging the assassinations, not only in Lancaster’s house, but under his very nose.
“Who?” Neville said softly.
Bolingbroke shook his head, obviously fighting for control of himself. “I do not know,” he said.
“There were so many people about, so many voices, so many bodies … I don’t know. Oh Lord Christ Savior, Neville. I had not thought Richard would dare to move so quick—”
“Hal, Tom, inside… now!” Raby walked between them and gave each a none-too-gentle shove toward the courtyard door of the Savoy.
“Ralph—” said Bolingbroke.
“Quick,” Neville said, joining his uncle in pulling Bolingbroke toward the door. The assassins might still he in the vicinity.
Bolingbroke regained some of his sense just as they stepped over the threshold and he shook off Tom’s and Raby’s hands.
“The hall,” Raby said.
Men-at-arms had carried in the corpses and arranged them on the trestle tables that Margaret had caused to be set up. Mary and Margaret wiped off the worst of the blood from the corpses, and rearranged their clothes neatly.
Once they had done, Lancaster dismissed everyone from the hall save Raby, Thomas Beauchamp—the Earl of Warwick—and Bolingbroke and Neville.
Lancaster still had not wiped the blood from his own hands, and now, as he stood at the head of both the tables, he raised them to chest height and looked at the four men standing about.
“Richard has gone too far,” he said in a flat voice. “This,” he moved a hand toward the two corpses, “is not the action of a misguided youth, but of a man of evil. Neville, Hal, you warned me against Richard many months ago. I did not listen to you. This … this is the result.”
He dropped his hands. “I listen now. Nay, I am prepared to do more than listen.”
Warwick glanced at Bolingbroke, then spoke. “My lord, there are many who will support you, but there are also many who will not. Richard has considerable strength behind him: de Vere, and all that unnatural sycophant’s allies and flatterers; Northumberland, who will be glad enough to watch both you and Raby trodden into the gutter, and all his allies.” Warwick mentioned five or six other names, all great peers of the realm who brought with them scores of lesser nobles. “And Richard has the support of the Church,” Warwick finished, “and the Church regards you with suspicion because of your protection of Wycliffe.”